Software graphs and programmer awareness

Abstract

Dependencies between types in object-oriented software can be viewed as directed graphs, with types as nodes and dependencies as edges. The in-degree and out-degree distributions of such graphs have quite different forms, with the former resembling a power-law distribution and the latter an exponential distribution. This effect appears to be independent of application or type relationship. A simple generative model is proposed to explore the proposition that the difference arises because the programmer is aware of the out-degree of a type but not of its in-degree. The model reproduces the two distributions, and compares reasonably well to those observed in 14 different type relationships across 12 different Java applications.